How Do Firing Costs Affect Innovation and Growth when Workers' Ability is Unknown? Employment Protection as a Burden on a Firm's Screening Process

Author

Abstract

This paper analyzes the implication of employment protection legislation on a firm's screening process. We present a model in which human-capital-intensive firms (high-tech firms) with imperfect information about their workers' type attempt during a trial period to identify those incompetent workers they will subsequently dismiss. However, employment protection measures place a burden on this screening process thereby motivating innovators to embark on medium-tech projects which are more flexible in their human capital requirements. As such, employment protection legislation distorts the pattern of specialization in favor of medium-tech firms over high-tech firms and consequently slows down the process of economic growth. The results of the paper are consistent with documented data on Europe versus US productivity growth and specialization patterns.

Statistics

Corrections

All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:liu:liucej:v:9:y:2012:i:1:p:3-30. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

We have no references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.